So why don't DC Republicans stand up to Donald Trump?

So if DC Republicans and DC Democrats united against Donald Trump they would basically be able to constrain a lot of his power by overriding his veto and so forth. At the same time, Donald Trump has been against a lot Republican party positions that were supposedly pretty important in their economic view of the world.

The thing is, I go on Facebook, and what do I see? There's this guy who posts anti-Democrat memes all day and then is lionizing Donald Trump. How does that remotely make sense when in some ways Donald Trump is acting like a Democrat and indeed used to be a Democrat?

Then, the Republican party apparently just caved on price controls for pharmaceuticals and they are very quiet on the subject of tariffs. I feel like if Obama had banned bump stocks they'd be acting differently than they are now with Donald Trump having banned them. It's kind of like they're not exactly being Republicans. They sort of quietly gave up on stuff that they would have claimed was extremely important under Obama.

So, if this stuff is important, you'd think they could easily block Trump. The Democratic party is eager to try and appeal to their base and it seems pretty clear that one way they can do this is to block Trump. Therefore, if the Republicans wanted to block him on something like ag tariffs, or on exploding stimulus spending, you'd think it would be relatively doable. But they don't. In fact they don't even dare to criticize him. But you know they would have criticized Obama for doing the same.

Why are they afraid to criticize him? Do they think their base won't vote for them if they do? If that is the case, why is the base apparently OK with Democratic party positions? In that case why even be a Republican voter? You would think you'd get more from your politicians if you didn't guarantee them your vote, if you made it known that you would vote for any party.

It's like everyone is completely inconsistent. The issues don't matter at all. It's all some weird branding effort, and what's even weirder is that voters apparently buy into it without noticing all this drift and pandering and inconsistency.

I can't make sense of it. What do people want? What are they thinking? Why is their sense of identity on the one hand so strident, but on the other hand so completely malleable? Did Donald Trump somehow do this to people? How did he hijack or somehow defeat the control that had traditionally been exerted by the political parties over their bases?

I felt it wasn't a shitpost. It's not just LOL TRUMP. It's more like my trying to know how voters' minds work.

Shitpost is just the title. We do have fairly constructive debates, in there. Plus, this is your third "serious," Trump thread, of late, and I'm being courteous to only include threads with Trump in the title. They are all going to devolve into the same subject matter that we already have in the PTOST, if they haven't already.

If you think the name of the PTOST thread should be changed, go for Phrost's approval, and one of us will make it happen.

I'll let this one ride, but this isn't NeverTrump.net - it's Bullshido.net. Please, stop trying to repurpose the site for your own political gains. Even if that's not your intent, it's what happens naturally by continually making new (and redundant) Trump threads.